


When the Lights Go Out

by lindenmae



Series: Bless me, Father [3]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: M/M, Religious Conflict
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 22:10:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindenmae/pseuds/lindenmae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The arrow was more disconcerting than the bullet, the way it barely whistled in the air before imbedding itself in the eye of the already half-dead man that was pressing the barrel of his gun to Knuckle’s throat.  The bullet at least gave some warning.  It echoed off walls and trees and the clouds like thunder.  The arrow just appeared, silent and deadly, and the man collapsed, blood spurting from the point of entrance and onto Knuckle’s robes and his hands.  The gun fell from the man’s lifeless fingers and clattered against the floor and Knuckle could only kneel and stare in shock, his hands still outstretched from when he’d been attempting to give the dying man his last rites.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Lights Go Out

**Author's Note:**

> Heresy, dub/con, violent imagery

The arrow was more disconcerting than the bullet, the way it barely whistled in the air before imbedding itself in the eye of the already half-dead man that was pressing the barrel of his gun to Knuckle’s throat.  The bullet at least gave some warning.  It echoed off walls and trees and the clouds like thunder.  The arrow just appeared, silent and deadly, and the man collapsed, blood spurting from the point of entrance and onto Knuckle’s robes and his hands.  The gun fell from the man’s lifeless fingers and clattered against the floor and Knuckle could only kneel and stare in shock, his hands still outstretched from when he’d been attempting to give the dying man his last rites.  

“You could thank me.”  G. growled as he stepped between Knuckle and the corpse, kicking the gun away with the toe of his boot.  

Knuckle stared up at him wordlessly.  He could feel a trickle of someone else’s blood trailing down the side of his face, or maybe it was sweat, but he couldn’t bring himself to wipe it away.

“He wouldn’t have thought twice about putting a hole in that pretty throat.”  The Storm clarified, taking Knuckle’s silence as confusion, seeming bored with the entire thing.  He surveyed the aftermath of their mission: six men dead, their bodies shot through with red-tipped arrows.  

Knuckle watched him make his way through the carnage, toeing the bodies over to expose their pockets and rifling through their clothing, looking for something.  His fingers shook violently and when the body at his knees twitched one final time with the last vestiges of life and silently expelled its last bit of bodily fluid, he promptly threw up.  G.’s eyes narrowed in disgust and he turned for the door.

“These were human beings.”  Knuckle whispered, barely audible, and G. scowled.

“These were _enemies_ of our family.  I did you a favor, unless you were hoping to meet your God today.”

It was awful; the way G. could make him feel guilty for feeling guilty.  G. waited only half a heartbeat at the threshold to the room they were in, bloodstained boots silent on the creaking hardwood floor for less than a second before he was through it and back into the night, leaving Knuckle behind.  It was awful; the way Knuckle wanted to follow him, wanted to feel G.’s heat against his body and not just because anything was better than the bitter cold seeping through his veins now that he was left alone in what amounted to a large coffin.  Knuckle felt bile in the back of his throat, threatening to rise again when he pushed to his knees, coins covering only ten of the twelve eyes in the room, only five of six prayers said over five of six bodies, and stumbled out the door after his boss’s right hand man.  

The night air felt cool on his face.  It chilled the sweat and blood marking his brow.  It made him shiver.  He shuffled slowly to the flickering orange end of a cigarette in the shadow of the building.  They worked at night when the streets were draped in shadows and the candles in the street lamps were only barely struggling to keep alight, a sudden desperate flicker the only illumination given to the city outside of the glare of the moon; when only the drunks and the urchins and the whores still dared to show their dirty faces to the world.  They went in pairs mostly, sometimes three or four, rarely the entire family, and they gritted their teeth and steadied their fingers against their weapons and did what was necessary.  They did what they had to whether they liked it or not.

Knuckle was no fool.  He was not naïve.  The gore made his heart ache and his fingers tremble as they traversed the beads of his rosary but it did not surprise him and it did not provoke him to run.  He bore it with the simple grace given him by his dedication and walked with heavy feet across blood soaked wooden floors and dirt alleys.  He did not discriminate between friend and foe when he knelt to pray over fallen bodies.  His cassock soaked through with the life essence of the dead, but he ignored it out of self-imposed duty.  Every man would face Charon before they could face Peter and the priest did what he could to aid them all in their final journey.

It unsettled Knuckle to see how little G. seemed to mind anything they were forced to do except the times they had to work together.  G. had a scowl reserved only for Knuckle, one that cut deep and spoke volumes of passion, sometimes lust but mostly hatred.  G. harbored the most loyalty, the most fervent dedication to the family, but he bore little love for the men he was forced to call his brothers.  Oh, he loved Giotto, loved the boss like they were true brothers.  Giotto was his hero and his best friend and G. would do anything for him, including tolerating a wayward priest who could barely bear the work they did.  The only other guardian that G. seemed to actually _like_ was the Rain and that was simple enough to understand.  Ugetsu was reliable and strong and not afraid to take another man’s life.  Where G. was all fiery temper and passion, Ugetsu was calm acceptance and diligence.  They offset each other in a way that Knuckle could never hope to, because he’d given up fighting.  He’d killed one man and sworn to never do it again and that was something that G. could never accept.

The image of the bodies lining the warehouse floor stayed with Knuckle, imprinted clearly on his mind.  His stomach still roiling, he walked past G. with determination, but unsure of his destination.  G. scowled in the shadows and Knuckle pretended not to see it.  He couldn’t do it anymore.  He couldn’t keep soiling himself for someone who didn’t respect him, for someone who barely even cared for him.  

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going, priest?”  G. snarled, pushing off from the wall against which he’d been leaning.  

Knuckle’s fingers curled into fists at his sides but he ignored the desire to confront the Storm Guardian.  It never ended well.  He couldn’t help someone who wanted to drown.  The fingers that wrapped around his bicep like a vice wouldn’t allow him to walk away though.  He refused to turn, refused to face G.  G.’s fingertips dug painfully into his muscle but he didn’t give any indication of his discomfort.  He’d shown too much weakness to G. already and he’d begun to realize that the man almost fed off of it.  It thrilled G. as much as it frustrated him to bring Knuckle to his knees.

“I asked you a question.  We’ve got to report to Giotto.  I don’t have time to waste on your weak stomach.”

Knuckle breathed deeply.  His head hurt.  His arm hurt where G. was gripping it.  His heart hurt where G. had stomped on it so many times that he was surprised that it could still beat.  

“I need to pray,” he finally said and it came out more like a growl, rough and husky with anger.  

“You just spent two hours praying.  This had better not be about _me._   I am sick of your patronizing bullshit.”

“No.”  When Knuckle spoke it was firm and just the smallest bit sad, but he wasn’t resigning himself to anything, not anymore.  What he felt couldn’t be described, but he hadn’t wanted to hit anyone so much as he wanted to hit G. now since the first time the man had cornered him in a dark alley and pressed him flush against a cold and unforgiving wall.  “May the Devil take you.”

He shook G.’s hand from his arm and began walking again, more than a little surprised at how easily the Storm Guardian had released him, at how G. didn’t seem to be attempting to follow, at how the other man wasn’t spitting venom at his back.  He could imagine G. standing still and silent in Knuckle’s wake, looking lost and maybe a bit broken, and it gave him no pleasure at all.

“ _Bastard._ ”  

And with that, the dam inside of Knuckle broke.  He turned, hands fisted, eyes alight.

“No, G.  My ma and da were very much married in the eyes of God and the law when I was born.  It is _you_ who is the bastard here.  Your mother thought to make a couple lire by spreading her legs and was punished for her sins by begetting you.” 

 The words were bitter on his tongue, sharp little knives that flew from his mouth and imbedded themselves in the man he was facing, visibly shocking him with every syllable.  This kind of speech had never been in his character, even in the stinking fighting pits, even with drink sitting heavy in his gut, but he couldn’t stop himself.  G. was the only person who could drag him down like this and even now, when he was finally standing up to his tormentor, he was still no better than a bully.

G.’s lips twisted up in a feral snarl that rendered his normally beautiful features ugly and he charged, one fist already up and aiming straight for Knuckle’s nose.  Knuckle didn’t even flinch.  He’d broken his nose for the first time at twelve, brawling behind his father’s bar with a seventeen year old boy who’d fancied himself a gangster and had been dropped with one punch for his troubles.  The neighborhood boys had learned what it meant to tussle with Knuckle then.  He’d earned his nickname and a reputation that spanned all of Ireland by the time he was sixteen.  By the time he was eighteen, he’d killed a man and found God and then _he’d_ been found by Giotto.

The fire of the fight raced through his veins in an instant, adrenaline coursing through his limbs and propelling him forward.  G.’s punch caught him in the cheek, snapped his head sideways, and stung like a bitch, but Knuckle didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.  He stared at the ground for the instant it took him to control the automatic urge to attack and slowly turned his head back to face a seething G.

“You think you’re better than me, you Irish fuck?”

“Your temper will get you killed one day, G.  It would do you well to grow up while there are still people who will mourn you when you ultimately die young.”

There was only a clear and very thin layer of self-control preventing G. from wrapping his hands around Knuckle’s throat.  He looked like he would enjoy watching the life slip from Knuckle’s body.  G. was furious, his cheeks rosy with anger, red eyes like glowing embers in the dark.  It was beautiful, tempting like Lucifer himself.  

“Fighting you would be extremely fulfilling.  Maybe the best fight I’ve ever had.”

“Then fucking hit me, you bitch.”

Knuckle could.  He could live up to his name and slam his fist against G.’s jaw and break it.  He could.  But he didn’t, he wouldn’t.  He wanted to, oh how he wanted to, but he’d made a promise to himself even bigger than the one he’d made to God and he wouldn’t break it.

“I want to.  You have no idea how much I want to.  I ache with it.  I wish I could get any gratification from hurting you the way you seem to get it from hurting me.”

“Vanity’s a sin.”  G. looked ready to burst.  Knuckle had let so much go because of the pain in G.’s eyes, pain G. would rather die than admit to.  

Knuckle had no real response to that statement.  He knew this was no minor case of vanity.  G. was attempting to deflect attention away from himself and his faults and provoke Knuckle at the same time.  He _always_ was and Knuckle had grown used to it by now, but the anger bubbling in his chest this time was something different, something volatile.  He’d reached his breaking point and really, he should have seen it coming.  He should have known G. would never let him alone, that G. would never back down until he’d broken the priest.  

“You’ve never kept your hatred for me a secret.”  His words were slow and even, masking the furious heat in his throat that spawned them.  “But what I have never understood is _why._   You were a proper Catholic once.  There is a crucifix in your room, yet you act like my religion, my life’s work, is something foreign to you.  What is it that you’re so afraid of, G.?”  

Knuckle stepped forward, hands fisted, eyes hard.  He crowded into G.’s body, his own taller and broader and angled for a fight.  He rounded his shoulders and set his jaw, ready for G. to hit him again, sure this episode could only end in fisticuffs. 

“I face down death everyday for this family so you don’t fucking have to.  I killed six men tonight so that you wouldn’t get blood on your hands!  I do all of the dirty work while you sit there and pray to a God that’s vindictive at best!  Don’t you dare tell me I’m fucking afraid!  Hell can’t be any worse than this.”

G. moved forward and Knuckle braced himself for the blow but it never came.  Fists and arrows weren’t the only things in G.’s arsenal and Knuckle knew it because it happened over and over again and he never did anything to stop it.  G.’s hand fisted in the front of Knuckle’s cassock and pulled him forward until their faces were centimeters apart, G.’s breath ghosting hot on Knuckle’s lips.  

“I would _never_ stand by and allow anyone I love to come to harm.  I don’t follow you to get in your way or to judge you.  I follow you because you’re reckless and temperamental and I pray over fallen bodies because someday one of those bodies might be yours.  Not everyone is your enemy.”  Knuckle whispered, and each word simmered in the air between them.  

With each syllable, Knuckle’s lips brushed against G.’s and he was so angry, so full of fury, but he was also being honest, laying himself out before the other man.  His tongue shot out to swipe across his bottom lip, tasting G.’s in the movement.  Even in the shadows Knuckle could see G.’s pupils blow, could feel his breath hitch.  The Storm’s twisted grip in his cassock faltered, loosened, and Knuckle narrowed his eyes and barred himself from thinking about the sudden yearning ache in his loins.   He broke G.’s grip on his clothes with a sharp sweep of his arm and turned away.  G.’s hard façade cracked; the pain that Knuckle sought out shone clear through his eyes.  Knuckle’s heart broke as he walked away but it was a feeling he’d come to know long before this.  G. was crushing Knuckle’s heart in his fist and Knuckle held no part of G. at all.

  
  
 

 


End file.
